


The Life Before Her Eyes

by Trixen



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-18 05:33:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4693898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trixen/pseuds/Trixen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One life. Her life. As a tumour looms, Buffy looks back on what was, what might have been, and what is. Memories beneath salt water, but burned along her nerves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Life Before Her Eyes

Her life feels like a series of tesseracts. Tiny rips in the fabric of daily minutes, seconds, hours, taking her through the pulsations of time. There are blank moments. Invisible dates when she has no idea where she was or what she did. Sometimes she glances over the calendar, but it is a blurred, inky image, as if she was staring at it underwater. She wonders if that is age. Age in its worst form. The destroyer of worlds. The Bringer. It is coming for her, and some would say it is poetic justice.  
  
_She is old, and she never thought she would be._ It wasn’t in the destiny books. All the Watchful men never saw it in their scrolls or crackling parchments. _That_ she decides, is the real poetic justice. They who were supposed to See, didn’t. Her hair is the color of Siberian tigers. Purplish spots, like exploding amethysts, cover her hands and feet. She speaks with a different tongue. There are some things she can’t remember. How to bake a carrot cake. That knowledge died with her Mother. What Dawn’s favourite band was. How Riley kissed. Why Angel left. But there are other things. Important things. Burned along her nerves and seared into her eyelids, so she cannot help but remember. She cannot help it, just as she cannot help herself.  
  
_She is fifteen, and smashing haunted bones to dust_. Terrible, swelling fear. She never feels it quite like that again. Her eyes are huge windows and she takes the skeleton in with her shutters, closing it tight in that secret place she can never let Xander Willow Giles see, because it is _hers_ and they can never know. The instrument feels heavy and good between her scraped palms and the dust of the kills is on her breath as she smashes and smashes and smashes. Each knotty bone strikes a part of her body, creating new contusions and bruises to explain away to her Mother and Dawn.  
  
Angel’s hand on her shoulder. The slight bump of his hip against her back. She feels his need to help her. It is unwelcome, just as much as it is craved. She drops the sledgehammer and clasps her hand claw-like over her mouth. The silver of her rings feels cold and stinging against her papery lips. Angel is waiting, waiting. She spins and rests her forehead against his collarbone. She thinks that she will always see the bones. He smells like winter and her fingers itch for a stake.  
  
_She is seventeen, newly seventeen, and she lets a man inside of her_. Forgotten drops of rain travel with him into the place that smells of blood and tears. She feels the give of her hymen and the slick slide of his penis and it is so cold that she draws in a startled breath.  
  
He is whispering to her and she isn’t sure she will ever understand what he is saying.  
  
_She is twenty and staring into the wax doll face of her dead Mother_. She knows Joyce is dead. The smell of the electricity they are using to revive her is sickening, and she wants to throw up. The taste of cornflakes and orange juice is at the back of her throat, waiting. She thinks of stupid things. Cajun pies and disemboweled children and the sound of wind chimes against her ear. Horrible whispers of death that want her answer.  
  
She wants to call Angel. She wants to lay down on the floor and snuggle against her Mother. She wants the sound of ribs breaking to stop echoing in the stillness of the afternoon. She wants to be blind, deaf, numb.  
  
Clear vomit, like a mirrored reflection she can stare into. There is sunshine for her cracked lips and sweat in the hollow between her thighs. Her Mother’s insides have stopped working. The air smells of them.  
  
_She is twenty – one and fucking a demon_. They search out deserted alleys and parked cars and sweat beneath the carpets in his crypt. Spike’s tongue is like sandpaper against the rose of her nipple.  
  
She is twenty-one and asked to choose. There are two lives worth living. One with the shadowy figures of parents she forgotten she had. One with a dead girl walking. She doesn’t know. Even if the first isn’t real, it is pungent and muddy and aromatic and she could drown in it. Safe. Small, grey room. Concerned doctor. A corner to hide in behind a door with metal grille.  
  
She chooses her death. Warren’s gunshot and bubbling blood and _Willow, what did you do? What did you do?_ She chooses Sunnydale. It is all she knows.  
  
_She is twenty-two and tells the truth_. She does love him. But she will leave him to burn with the taste of Angel still in her mouth. She will leave him to burn to ash.  
  
She is twenty-two and dating the Immortal. Because she can. Sometimes there are faded postcards in the mail from her friends. The sun-swept beaches of Brazil. African safaris. Wet, cool leaves of England. They are all settling, even as they rise up. She hears little pulses of her old life. Angel working for Wolfram and Hart. Wesley, dead. Spike back from the grave. Angel surviving his final fight. She salutes him with the barest of gestures – one warrior to another – and continues living. Things cannot stop because of circumstance.  
  
_She is twenty-nine and her sister cannot stop coughing blood_. There are tiny sores on her body. The lips of the wounds are the colour of egg yolk. She reads to Dawn. Fairy tales and books of science and Russian history. The lights of the Roman sunset fade and bend over their bodies on the bed. Little arrows of orange, leading to Dawn’s heart. Green electricity shines brilliantly for one moment and then fades.  
  
She holds her sister. She holds flesh and muscle and bone and smells her insides. She cannot weep, so she screams. Her throat bulges and the books fall onto the floor, their thin pages transparent as dreams.  
  
_She is thirty-one and married_. Her husband loves her carefully crafted whippet thin body. He loves the thick butter of her hair. He is a stock broker and hates math. It is part of the reason she married him. Thriving on contradiction has become a pastime. At Christmas, he reads her poetry. Yeats, Neruda, Rossetti, Rainer-Rilke, and she winds herself around the familiarity of his bones. His voice stirs her into waking. His voice is all she hears when she sleeps. The past has become a seaweed dream. Left underneath salt water and blood. She is pregnant and hopes she will give birth at sunset.  
  
_She is thirty-eight and she wishes she could send her son to Neverland_. He is growing up and away from her. She misses him swimming in her belly. Sometimes she would imagine she could feel the heat of his palms rising beneath her bellybutton. Now he is the silver stitched through her hair and the lines weaving around her mouth. He is making her old.  
  
Her husband thinks she is funny. “All children must let go sometime, darling,” he tells her with his quirking mouth. He still reads her poetry and she still hears his voice in her waking dreams. London is noisy hot sweltering in the summer and she thinks of Pacific blue sky and cool, sweet graveyards that smell of bones.  
  
_She is forty-nine and burying her husband_. Her son holds her hand mutely in his own. He smells of crayons and chocolate milk and flesh. Funny since he is almost nineteen years old and ripening into a man underneath the weight of this unforgiving world. But she still thinks of him as her baby. Squashy and elastic after a bath. Slippery in her stomach. Covered with guts and blood at birth.  
  
Her eyes razor over the headstone and the fresh dirt crawling with dung beetles and she breathes in and thinks that she has to go home.  
  
_She is fifty-four and still walks with a light, quick, brilliant step_. California is hot and smells of asphalt and coconut rum. She lives by the beach and awakens to salty air and the creamy waves. Surfers whistle at her when she walks down for her morning swim and it paints a blush on her cheek. She thinks she can still pass for thirty if people are far enough away. Her son agrees with her in his letters. He stayed in England and married and is living out his life.  
  
She fears for him and doesn’t know why.  
  
She is fifty-four and gets the news of Giles’ death. She cannot cry. She sends flowers to his wife and drives to Sunnydale. It is a little canyon in a dry desert. She parks by the hole and gazes down down down into the pit that once teemed with her moments. It is like a tesseract. A rip in the earth to remind her how far she has fallen. If she slipped in, just for a sweet second, would she find her friends? Would she find her ghost and Faith and Angelus and William – would she seek out her sister and Joyce and would she see the past unfolding like a tapestry of all that has made her. All that has made her.  
  
_She is sixty-five and walking down a Los Angeles street in the dusky twilight._ She passes Spike. Platinum blond and black leather and he has not changed. She is not surprised. He doesn’t recognize her and keeps walking.  
  
She goes home and stares at the mirror until nothing makes sense. Until her nose and eyes and mouth cream together. She wonders if it was worth it, getting older. She sticks out her tongue at the reflection. His cool semen in her mouth. The hot brick in the alley and the smell of frying meat. Bite-marks near her pubic hair and the stench of his sweat mapping her body for future lovers.  
  
She stares at the mirror until she cannot remember what she looked like then.  
  
_She is seventy-two when the doctors find cancer in her breast_. Her body is betraying her. They want to cut it off and stitch it together to make lumpy skin without a nipple. The same rose nipple that William’s tongue hardened. The same nipple that Angel wept over. The same nipple that gave her son his milky breakfast. She says no and goes for a walk along the pier in Santa Monica. She imagines the cancer spreading like a black stain over white. She remembers her Mother’s shocked expression and Dawn’s quiet peace. Her eyes pass over the ocean without seeing it.  
  
A hand on her shoulder.  
  
She spins slowly and looks up.  
  
She sees the life before her eyes and sways briefly.  
  
His eyes are dark and young but his hair is graying. She touches it and then asks, “Why didn’t you tell me?” because the question begs a response. It is a terrible, intimate murmur creeping along her skin.  
  
“You needed to live,” he answers. “And so did I.”  
  
He kisses her lips softly and it feels like the scrape of an insect’s wing.  
  
“Buffy,” he says.  
  
Buffy. She remembers. Buffy. She steps out of the hurrying Time and tastes Angel inside her mouth.  
  
Leaning against him, she cradles her body with his and stares at the ocean.  
  
It is alive.

 

~Finis


End file.
